How frustrated cooks built My Food Bag’s Cecilia Robinson a $27m business

From left: Nadia Lim, Theresa Gattung and Cecilia Robinson are bringing the subscription service that home-delivers recipes and all the ingredients needed to cook them to Australia.
AFR

by
Michael Bailey

A subscription service that home-delivers recipes and all the ingredients needed to cook them has amassed 10,000 subscribers in its first 18 months in New Zealand, turning over $NZ30 million ($27.3 million) annually, and hopes to repeat the trick here.

My Food Bag is the brainchild of James and Cecilia Robinson, a married couple who run an au pair network in New Zealand. When the couple began having their own children, Cecilia was reminded of a recipe-and-ingredients home delivery business launched to great success in her native Sweden in 2009.

“Working mums love cooking as much as anyone else, it’s just that deciding what to cook every day and then going and shopping for it becomes a nightmare," she says.

The couple spent two years developing the concept for My Food Bag, bringing in Theresa Gattung – a former chief executive of Telecom New Zealand – as a one-third investor and director along the way.

While the Robinsons are in Australia launching the business – which delivered its first food bag in June – Gattung is running the business in New Zealand. There it has 10,000 subscribers, in Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington, after starting in March 2013.

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My Food Bag’s sales are split “pretty equally" between a “gourmet" option delivering four premium meals a week for two people, and “family" or “classic" bags delivering five meals for couples with kids under 10 years old or over age 10 respectively, Cecilia Robinson says.

A just-in-time business

All the food is seasonal and fresh, and meats free-range wherever possible. Robinson says all this means the company can only begin planning recipes and placing orders with suppliers about three weeks ahead of deliveries. The chilled trucks contracted by My Food Bag also make their rounds on the most expensive day of the week – Sunday – because this is the most convenient day for customers.

“It’s a just-in-time business with lots of moving parts; it’s a logistical nightmare," she says.

All food businesses are “notoriously low margin", so the company’s aim is to grow quickly.

“In our first 18 months in Australia I’d like to replicate what we have done in New Zealand," Robinson says.

The company’s Australian general manager is Tim Elwin, whom Robinson says built up a wholesaler and retail home-deliverer of ethical sustainable foods, urbanfoodmarket.com.au, over several years before selling it six months ago.

My Food Bag also taps into the “celebrity chef" phenomenon, which partly explains the renewed popularity of home cooking. Recipe development in New Zealand is led by a previous winner of MasterChef in that country, Nadia Lim, while Miguel Maestre, of Network Ten’s The Living Room, works with a team of test cooks, nutritionists and the Robinsons themselves to develop recipes in Australia.